


Mare Nostrum

by albion



Category: Hetalia: Axis Powers
Genre: Drug Use, Gen, Hetalia Kink Meme
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-10
Updated: 2013-12-10
Packaged: 2018-01-04 07:01:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 809
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1077973
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/albion/pseuds/albion
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>De-anon from the kink meme. Original prompt was "Mediterranean nations, love for the Mediterranean." Original fill <a href="http://hetalia-kink.livejournal.com/19013.html?thread=67067973#t67067973">here</a>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Mare Nostrum

Sometimes, with a glass of wine in his hand and a cigarette half burning between his lips, France sits and gazes out at the Mediterranean Sea.  
  
_Mare Nostrum_ , Rome had called it.  
  
Our Sea.  
  
He loves the ocean; loves it even more at night when all one can see is black ink, still as death and silent as the grave.  
  
There is something dreadful and stunningly beautiful about death, France thinks, and as he compares the shades of colour between his wine cup and the ocean, the face of a Corsican general passes through his mind.  
  
They could have owned it all, maybe.  
  
  
  
Spain often goes down to the beach on a clear blue day to gaze out over the ocean.  
  
He remembers Al-Andalus, and Rome, and if he really thinks hard, hard enough for his brain to start hurting, he even thinks he can remember a young man with shining white teeth and curly hair.  
  
Phoenicia. Perhaps that was his name.  
  
The sea grants him many things: cool breezes through day and night and a plethora of different types of food that Spain loves to explore with.  
  
Seafood paella was on his favourite food list for a long time. France even complimented it, and France normally does not comment well on any food but his own.  
  
  
  
To Greece, the Mediterranean is a symbol of everything he is and wants to be.  
  
It shines, clear and blue and perfect, unbroken except for the tiny lines of boats, stitches through silk. There is a radiance of peace and calm that elevates, and Greece has fallen asleep on the sand beside it many times, only to be woken by anxious locals at dusk for fear of the tide coming in.  
  
His mother had a name for it: _Mesogeios_. She was a fearsome woman to behold; bronze breastplate blinding in the summer sun and sword flashing as she stood with Theseus, and Achilles, and Jason.  
  
He has travelled this ocean and his islands on it since his birth and he will do till the moment he dies. His mother was buried in the sea; the salty smell of it permeates his being and comforts him during times of trouble.  
  
  
  
Romano is very proud of the Mediterranean. It was his grandfather's dominion, and, well, even if it does not belong to the House of SPQR anymore, it still belongs to him in spirit.  
  
Veneziano always preferred sitting indoors, painting masterpieces and designing palazzos and carving men out of marble, but Romano loves nothing more than to sit down on a bench in his lands, with only the sea and some gelato for company.  
  
Sometimes he hires a boat and goes to Capri for the day; wandering through the back streets, smelling the lemon blossom and submersing himself in the thought that even if he hadn't been Rome's favourite, even if the other nations called his brother _Italy_ and him merely _Romano_ , even if the whole world forgot the fact that his heart was the Eternal City; these lands and islands were his and no one else's.  
  
Fuck the world.  
  
The Mediterranean was his paradise and nothing else mattered.  
  
  
  
His beautiful mother, with a cobra on her headdress and robes of nearly translucent linen, once told Egypt that without the Mediterranean, the sacred Nile would have had nowhere to flow and Chaos would have taken over the land.  
  
Islam was his religion now, and he does not believe in gods and goddesses, but he appreciates the sea the same way his mother did. It allows for trade and travel, and, by Allah, it is _beautiful_.  
  
Every new year, the ancient date of wep-renpet, he slips down to Alexandria and drops a necklace into the white foam of the water. To honour his mother's memory, he tells himself, and to honour the memory of a civilization long gone, but never forgotten.  
  
  
  
The White Sea has a possessive hold over Turkey.  
  
He tells himself that he is being foolish: the sea has been here since the beginning of his time on earth and it will not disappear as long as he is around, but he cannot help the feelings of pride and joy that erupt from his soul whenever he is near.  
  
It is most beautiful at dusk, he decides, and from a vantage point in a small café that serves bitterly strong coffee and baklava every night, he lets the memories of thousands of years of history sweep through him.  
  
Carthage, Phoenicia, Rome, Macedonia and Thracia: he had known them all.  
  
They were gone now; their legacies trapped in historic sites and artefacts, kept preserved in museums rarely frequented by the youth of today.  
  
But Turkey thought that the mere sight of the Mediterranean Sea was heritage enough.  
  
And as the thin smoke of the hookah passes through his lips, he sits back and smiles.

 


End file.
